Drones Kill, Yes, but They Also Rescue, Research and Entertain

One day in 1945, the crew of the aircraft carrier Intrepid gathered on deck for a group picture with what looks like a model airplane, not too much larger than the radio-controlled planes that hobbyists had been flying since the 1930s.

It was a drone.

Named for the buzzing sound it made in flight, and manufactured in the thousands during World War II, it served as a remote-controlled target for gunners.

The toylike drone had a nifty feature. If the gunners failed to bring down the drone, an operator on deck could send a radio signal that released a small parachute, allowing the drone to float down, ready for pickup and reuse.

Visitors to the “Drones: Is the Sky the Limit?” exhibition can take an Odyssey X-7 Microlite drone for a spin.CreditMark Kauzlarich for The New York Times

The show is timely. It seems as if each day’s news brings reports of a military drone attack, or developments in Amazon’s plan to set up a drone-delivery system for small packages. The future is now, drone-wise.

The “Drones” show puts the technology in context, providing it with a history and surveying its proliferating uses, both benign and malign. In all shapes and sizes, drones measure hurricane intensity, count penguins, look for structural flaws on oil rigs and deliver lifesaving medicines to remote jungle villages. They have invaded the arts. Eight circular lampshades, each wrapped around a drone, executed a complex aerial choreography in “Paramour,” the Cirque du Soleil Broadway show that closed last month.

The exhibition includes one of the lampshades, for closer inspection, but the pièce de résistance in its arts coverage is Volantis, the “flying dress” designed by Lady Gaga and unveiled at ArtRave, a 2013 event in a Brooklyn warehouse. In a video of the maiden voyage, shown on a nearby wall, Lady Gaga, wearing white vinyl boots and a white helmet, steps into a voluptuously contoured torso of molded white fiberglass attached to a small platform. Powered by six drones on extended arms, it ascends to a cruising altitude of three feet, with Lady Gaga looking very much like the figurehead on a starship prow. It is, undeniably, a moment.

The exhibition was organized by Eric Boehm, the museum’s curator of aviation, who collaborated with Mary L. Cummings and Alexander J. Stimpson. Dr. Cummings, known as Missy, is a former Navy fighter pilot who now directs Duke Robotics and the Humans and Autonomy Lab at Duke University. Dr. Stimpson is a research scientist in the department of mechanical engineering and materials sciences at Duke and a partner, with Ms. Cummings, in Autonometrics, a company that advises clients on autonomous systems.

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A custom Navy-branded racing drone and goggles on display at a station on the Drone Racing League at the exhibition.CreditMark Kauzlarich for The New York Times

“Drones,” like the mind-boggling gadgets it describes, covers a lot of ground, with just enough pop culture diversion, “Jetsons”-style futurism and hands-on interaction to keep the exhibition from becoming a drone catalog.

For gear heads, though, there’s a ton of hardware. It is impossible to sidestep the Gyrodyne QH-50, a drone anti-submarine helicopter, or DASH, which saw decades of Cold War service, beginning in the late 1950s. Squat and menacing, despite the bright colors, it fit on smaller vessels unable to carry piloted aircraft. Two nuclear depth bombs on the undercarriage could deliver the goods, if called for.

On a smaller scale, drone ingenuity has assumed myriad guises. The AeroVironment RQ-14 Dragon Eye, a six-pound reconnaissance drone developed about 15 years ago, fits into a backpack and can be launched by hand or with an elastic cord. Once aloft, flying at speeds of up to 40 miles per hour, it transmits live images back to the operator’s goggles.

The peaceful drones include dinky racers, small enough to be Christmas stocking stuffers, that goggle-equipped operators steer through obstacle courses in stadiums, abandoned malls or empty factories at speeds of up to 80 m.p.h. The sport is taking off, so to speak. ESPN recently acquired the rights to broadcast races sanctioned by the Drone Racing League. Visitors to the exhibit can get a taste of the action by picking up a remote controller — the kind that comes with a video game — and guiding a small drone through circles and triangles suspended in a net cage.

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Volantis, the drone-powered “flying dress” designed by Lady Gaga. CreditMark Kauzlarich for The New York Times

The heartwarming drones — as opposed to the “Top Gun” annihilators — also come in a variety of shapes and sizes. The humanitarian award goes, hands down, to the Zipline, a small drone being used in Rwanda to transport blood and medicine through the jungles during the rainy season. A four-hour journey by truck over muddy roads takes something like 15 minutes by drone. Having dropped off its precious cargo, the lifesaver flies back to home base, ready for the next mission.

The eBee drone, weighing a pound and a half, does duty as a census enumerator, sailing aloft for nearly an hour at a time and allowing scientists to count moving animal populations. Its birdlike V wing made it a nonthreatening presence to Arctic penguins on a recent assignment, but the model on view at the exhibit bears serious battle scars, inflicted by hostile birds.

The long historical road leading to the eBee, and onward to the Amazon Prime Air drone, starts with the Civil War, for the visitor, and it is a journey worth taking. Charles Perley, a New Yorker, might be considered the father of the drone. In 1863, he patented a bomb-dropping balloon intended to fly over enemy defenses and drop its payload, causing death and confusion. No one could perfect a timing device, so balloon bombing never got out of the starting gate.

Fast forward to the Bug, developed during World War I. Resembling a small biplane, it could, in theory, fly over enemy trenches, shed its wings and become, like Clark Kent leaving the phone booth, a lethal weapon. More than a thousand were manufactured, but the war ended before the technology could be employed.

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Norma Jeane Dougherty, later known as Marilyn Monroe, at work on an OQ-2 Radioplane.CreditMark Kauzlarich for The New York Times

There is a Wile E. Coyote aspect to these clever, but not quite clever enough, inventions. The Japanese, in one of the odder experiments in World War II, outfitted paper balloons with incendiary bombs and sent them on an eastward course across the Pacific, transported by a steady air current that Japanese scientists had chanced upon. More than 9,000 balloons made the journey, landing from Alaska to Mexico, and as far as Michigan, their goal to ignite forest fires and spread mayhem.

The program was remarkably ineffective, although a balloon bomb was responsible for the only civilian deaths inflicted by the Japanese on the American mainland. In May 1945, Elsie Mitchell, a pastor’s wife, took five children for an outing near Bly, Ore. All were killed when the children poked at a balloon bomb that had lodged in a tree.

But back to the drone pictured in the 1945 photograph aboard the Intrepid. It was a TDD, which stands for Target Drone, Denny, and it had a Hollywood connection. Denny was named for Reginald Denny, a suave English leading man during the silent era and, later, a reliable silver-haired uncle in the talkies. Like many others inspired by the feats of Lindbergh and Earhart, he had become a model-airplane hobbyist. He opened a hobby shop and created the Radioplane Company to manufacture model airplanes and engines.

In 1940, Denny won an Army contract to produce radio planes as target drones for military use, and at this point, Ronald Reagan enters the picture. As captain at the head of a motion picture unit popularly known as the Celluloid Commandos, and a friend of Denny’s, he sent Pvt. David Conover to take some routine pictures of civilians doing war work at the Radioplane plant in Culver City, Calif.

Private Conover trained his lens on a 19-year-old assembler, Norma Jeane Dougherty, who posed, holding a propeller and flashing a million-dollar smile. He told her she was photogenic and should consider a career in modeling. We all know the rest of the story, but the exhibition gives it a slightly different spin: No drones, no Marilyn Monroe.

The line between present and future is thin in the drone world. The curators have set up a kiosk that transmits the latest developments from the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College. Postcard-style pictures on a video screen hint at the latest developments in technology, government regulations and drone incursions into the arts and humanities. A touch of the stegosaurus card, for example, summons up a report on drones being used to map dinosaur footprints in locations too remote for scientists to reach.

The future, in other words, might be a lot closer than anyone thinks. The Amazon Prime Air drone, laughed off when it was first announced, is getting tryouts in Britain. Alas, the prototype, which the exhibition curators failed to secure, crashed, but other drones have entered the breach. The show makes space for a life-size concept car, Kairos Air’s self-piloting electric vehicle, and shows the apartment tower of the future, each terrace outfitted with its own drone pad. Uber, this has your name written all over it.

Drones: Is the Sky the Limit?Through Dec. 3 at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum; intrepidmuseum.org.